State of the docs, March 2, 2012

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To organize and prioritize documentation work on Mozilla Developer Network, we are setting up a system for topic drivers. The person who is the driver for each topic area will prioritize the work for that subject and help ensure that things get written when appropriate. If you’re interested in driving the docs for a particular area, speak up on the dev-mdc mailing list, or in the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org. If you have questions about the docs for a particular topic area, seek out that topic’s driver in IRC, e-mail, or Twitter (or ask the community in general if you can’t find that person).

Here’s a sampling of the activity of our splendid documentation community over the past couple of weeks.

Mozilla project docs

2 comments

Géza

Hi, this is great!
Are you going to prune the different wikis, kb-s etc. and pages not maintained over several versions, and kind of standardize?
I’m even more curious how you will guideline (“shepherded”) that much of people, after all, they are an ‘open source flock’ ;-)
Maybe, you might add the ‘documentation updated’ as a non-functional criteria for e.g. Q&A.
Have a nice day!

You are right that “shepherding” in open source is challenging. Enlisting more people in the effort is one way, which is part of the reason for “topic drivers”. If an area has fallen into neglect, it can be hard to find someone to maintain it. On MDN, we use tags like “NeedsUpdate” to flag outdated content — feel free to add it to pages that need help. We love it when people migrate appropriate content from other sources (wikis or blogs) into MDN. We are working on some degree of standardization, such as adding browser compatibility tables to Web standards reference docs. And while it isn’t a QA requirement, there is a “dev-doc-needed” keyword in Bugzilla to flag code changes that affect documentation on MDN.